Jodi Dean on “Neoliberal Fantasies”

I am proud to announce that the first speaker in the 2005-2006 DeRoy Lecture Series, which I organize for the English Department at Wayne State University, is Jodi Dean (author of Aliens in America and the forthcoming Zizek’s Politics) speaking on “Neoliberal Fantasies.”
If anyone reading this is in the Detroit area: the lecture takes place at 3:30pm, Friday, September 30, in the English Department Conference Room (suite 10302, 5057 Woodward).

I hope you will offer a summary of this talk. It’s already been given. What exactly did she mean by neoliberal fantasies? Does she think that liberals are evil or misguided or something?

How would you characterize, or how would she characterize, her own politics?

I suppose I always wonder why liberalism is considered so rotten. Lyotard finally came down on the side of liberalism. After the 20th century I think you just have to give up on communism.

Liberalism offers the happy mean between communism and fascism. I like Aristotle’s belief in the happy mean, or the golden mean. Perhaps it offers too much leeway for individualism for the tastes of some to the far left or to the far right. But that’s why I like it. I like individualism.

Given her other published work, and her blog, I’m assuming that the “neoliberal” fantasy is in reference to economic theory, not to the question of classical or modern liberalism as poolitical philosophies.

But I disagree that liberalism is a happy mean between communism and fascism, as I think liberalism is more of a prerequisite, historically and philosophically, for fascism, not its necessarily structural other. Which isn’t to say that fascism follows ineluctably, but rather that liberalism contains fascism as a possibility within it.

Still, is there anyway we can get a summary or text of the talk? Or would it be easier to ask Jodi? And I wonder when everyone will just start podcasting these things…